Overview
This guide covers Fusion.Introduction to basic fusion techniques, plus numbers about how certain methods are better.Followed by more advanced techniques, and numbers about how they are again better.
Fusion Basics
What is fusion. Fusion is a very important mechanic in Shop Heroes, in which you throw a bunch of items into a magical pot and hope something better comes out. It’s something you’ll need to master, or at least be familiar with if you want to craft high level items and/or have a steady gem income.
We’ll start by talking about the user interface.
In the center, there are five available item slots for you to put items into in order to have a go at fusion. However, you only start with 3 slots unlocked, and must level up the cauldron to level 6 and then level 11 to unlock slots 4 and 5, respectively. You also have to level up your cauldron to be able to fuse higher level items. For example, a level 11 cauldron can fuse items that are level 30 and below. See the “upgrade tables” section below for more information about unlocks.
On the right, there are two panels showing you the top 3 most likely results of the fusion and the best case scenario of the fusion.
Finally, on the bottom right, we have the success rate of the current combination of items and the Fuse! button, with text telling us how long it will take.
To clarify on the two different uses percent chance here, we can call one the “item chance” and the other “success rate”, as it is written.
When you fail a fusion, based on the success rate, YOU ONLY LOSE ONE ITEM.
The item lost is randomly chosen from the ingredients that you used.
The below picture shows the most basic fusion, which is fusing two common quality items.
You’ll probably end up using this a lot early game, as it is extremely helpful for quickly and assuredly acquiring good quality items that may show up in bulk orders (when certain NPCs come to your store, asking you to make a large quantity of 3 different items).
Below are a few more standard fusions. I provided the different tiers so that you can see how the required time to complete the fusion increases pretty quickly.
Saving Time
As we saw earlier, higher quality items require more time to fuse. Luckily, there are a few tricks you can use to decrease the fusion time. Again let’s start with the most basic one: mixing items.
When you throw multiple types of items into the fusion cauldron, the time required to complete the fusion is cut by a pretty significant amount. Here are the two items by themselves in the pot.
As you can see, we have cut the time down to just half of what it would have been if we were fusing one item type. (9 minutes vs 4.5 minutes).
In order to most effectively use this trick, you should consider finding either 2 or even 3 different desired items that you want high qualities of, so that it doesn’t really matter which one comes out of the pot, and you’ll benefit by saving yourself a ton of time.
You’ll notice later on in the guide that I use same item types for most of the pictures. Don’t let that fool you! You can apply this item mixing trick to virtually any pot, regardless of quality, in order to get drastically reduced waiting times. (ie. “Flawless Claymore” + “Flawless Muted Caster” + “Flawless Double String”).
One quirk to note about mixing items is that lower level items have a greater weight when determining the result of the fusion. If you tried to fuse a Claymore, a Muted Caster and a Double String of any given quality, they’re all around level 8 so you would have ~33% chance of getting any one of the three.
However if you tried fusing two level 14 items and one level 8 item, the level 8 item would have a ~60% chance of coming out over ~20% for the other two. Percentages will vary with different items and different qualities.
Saving Items
Now we dive into the first of our non-100% success rate fusions: fusing great quality into flawless. Take this section with a grain of salt as RNG may be against you on any given day, but as far as the math goes, you should be able to save some items in the long run.
In the first section you may have noticed that if you put 3 great quality of the same item into the pot, there’s a 100% success rate. However, this can end up costing you a ton of items. Instead, let’s take a look at our odds for combining only 2 great quality of an item.
As you can see, we have a 75% chance of success when using two greats. The easiest way to figure out if using 2 items is actually better than using 3 is to extrapolate and use a large theoretical sample. Bear with me here.
If we were to attempt 1000 fusions using 2 greats each time, we would use 2000 greats.
Based on the success rate, we would succeed 750 times and fail 250 times. Now keep in mind that we only lose 1 item per failure so we actually reused 250 greats. We can just subtract that from our total input, meaning we only used 1750 greats.
In order to fairly compare against using 3 greats, we’ll reverse engineer our sample size based on how we would achieve the same amount of flawless output, but while only using 2 greats as input.
So in order to get 750 flawless quality, we would simply multiply that by 3, since when we use 3, we have a 100% success rate. That costs us 2250 greats and we don’t get anything back since we didn’t fail anything.
As you can see, over a long period of time and many fusions, if you use only 2 greats to create flawless items, you should start saving a large amount of items. Keep in mind that this is still just a basic fusion technique though, as we will discuss an even better method later.
The same theory applies to fusing flawless quality into epic, even if the math is slightly different.
If we attempt 1000 fusions using 3 flawless each time, we end up using 3000 flawless.
We would succeed 560 times and fail 440 times. We reuse 2 items per failure so we have 440×2 flawless left over. Subtracting that from our initial total gives us 2120 used.
Now switching to reverse engineering mode to compare using 4 flawless and 5 flawless:
If we want to output 560 epics using 4 flawless as input each fusion, we’ll need around 747 fusions. (Remember our math for working with percentages; “560 is 75% of what” means 560 = 0.75x)
For 747 fusions, we end up using 2988 flawless as input, but we reuse 250×3, bringing that down to 2238 used.
If we want to output 560 epics using 5 flawless as input each fusion, we do another simple multiplication since it’s 100% success rate.
You might notice here that statistically speaking, fusing 2 flawless will save the most items. However, take into consideration the fact that we are only covering saving items in this section, and while it might save a couple extra items, it consumes much more time. Again, we’ll talk about saving time later.
When fusing flawless, either use 3 or 4 flawless as input, but never 5. Again, remember that you can mix item types to bring down wait times.
I’ll save you some reading and just give you the table.
Again we see that 100% success rate fusions are far from the best, as far as number of items used goes.
Inputting 3 epics seems to be the sweet spot for saving items. Once again don’t forget about mixing multiple types of desired items in order to bring down fusion times drastically.
Like I said at the top of the section, you should take these maths with a grain of salt because most people aren’t fusing 3000 epics every day so long run statistics don’t apply to them.
If you’re just trying to fuse 1 legendary to equip a hero with, then I would say go ahead and just do 4 or even 5 in a pot to get that 100% success rate and give you some peace of mind.
Fusing mythics is an entirely different ball game, since the percentages are so low, and because of how long it takes to even get a legendary to use as an ingredient.
While statistically, it may be better to use 2 legendaries as input vs 3/4/5, which configuration you choose is actually dependent on the level of the ingredients. If you are fusing some low level chest blueprint items for their passive skills, I would recommend using 2 legendaries as input, as you will indeed save items in the long run, and a failed attempt doesn’t cost you that much time.
However for high level items that are really time consuming to produce, it might be worth throwing in that extra 1 or 2 for the boosted success rate. This will come down to personal preference.
Going from 2 legendary inputs to 3 gives 13% more success rate and going from 3 to 4 gives 12%. Putting in the last item to total 5 inputs only gives 10% extra.
Good + Great
Now that we’ve covered mixing different items to save time, and using fewer items per fusion to save you items in the long run, let’s get to a sort of combination of the two.
As you can see in the picture, we have come across an interesting combination. We input 1 good quality and 1 great quality, and somehow we have a chance to get a flawless! And it’s only taking 2 items! And it’s 100% success rate!
Again we can math it out to see if this really is a good combination.
If we have a 1000 fusions sample size, we obviously will end up using 1000 of good quality and 1000 of great quality.
Given the approximate 60% / 40% split for the result, we will end up with 600 greats and 400 flawless. And since it takes 16 minutes to do one fusion we end up wasting about 270 hours of our life. Great.
Once again we must reverse engineer our sample size to make the comparison fair/easy to comprehend. So we now try to figure out how to get 600 great and 400 flawless using the standard same quality fusions.
To get our 600 greats from the standard 2 good quality input fusion. We simply need 1200 goods, and exactly 600 fusions at 19 minutes. That’s 190 hours.
I will be using the 2 greats for 75% success rate method, since we have discovered it to be superior. To get 400 flawless, we need about 534 fusions which is 1068 greats, but we get 133 back so that’s 935 spent. At 31 minutes per fusion we spend 276 hours making flawless.
By not following conventional fusion techniques we have now saved ourselves hundreds of hours and a few items. Sure the item savings aren’t that great, but look at how much quicker you’re able to produce the same results compared to standard fusions. Good + Great is great!
Flawless + Common
Flawless and common of the same item:
What we have here is a flawless, common combo. If you take a look at the item chances and success rate, you might be surprised to find such a large chance to get an epic out of this combo, and with a fusion success rate of 100% no less.
^ Self-explanatory… Unfortunately one issue you might run into for fusing lower level items is that once you master the item, you can no longer craft commons. If you run into this problem, I would suggest still using good + great fusions, and then 3xFlawless.
This is another take on flawless, common fusion, with a taste of item mixing thrown in. You’ll notice that the item chance rates are more or less the same, except the epic chance is now split between two items. Since you will likely hit the flawless result much of the time, this method is often used to “boost” valuable common quality items with cheap flawless items.
An example would be a level 30ish common quality chest blueprint item that has a value of 500k combined with a level 22ish flawless quality regular blueprint item that has a value of 200k (even at flawless). If you proc the flawless result for the level 30ish item, you stand to gain millions (after applying the 10x gold multiplier for selling on the Trade House. 2m vs 5m).
Another way to look at this brand of f+c fusion is that you only have around 20% chance to get something you don’t want. An epic of either type results in some gems and a flawless of the good item means you’re that much closer to an epic of that item.
Some Random Combinations
Here are some combinations you might be interested in doing when you have a lot of “Junk Epics” or “Junk Legendaries” which are just either really low level or really low gem cost items that you probably don’t even care about. We all have those really lame exceptional crafts that we get on precrafts.
In this image, I have 1 Flawless Magic Riders (gold chest blueprint), 2 Flawless Shockers (gold chest blueprint), 1 Flawless Widow Maker (gold chest blueprint) and 1 Epic Spiked Shield. Even though it’s an epic quality item, the Spiked Shield’s value is insanely lower than any of the other 4 items, due to it being a regular blueprint and because it’s level is lower than the other items.
However, in this scenario, you can see that for a cost of maybe 25ish gems (the value of the Epic Spiked Shield), not only am I given a 100% success rate, but I now also have around a 10% chance of boosting any of my flawless items straight into Legendary. Even supplying a 5th flawless of the same caliber as the other 4 items would be more costly than this cheap epic.
This could potentially be a huge gem profit, as any of the other items sell for hundreds. If I only get an Epic out of it, well I still only lost 20 gems.
Here’s the same concept but with 4 chest blueprint Epics having a chance of being boosted by a terrible level 23 legendary.
You probably won’t be boosting with legendary items until pretty late game since even an 80 gem legendary is still a huge amount of gems for most people. However, you can start to see how fusion can be very profitable if you combine the right items.
Upgrade Tables
You first unlock the fusion cauldron by getting your shopkeeper to level 6.
Fusion slots are the number of actual concurrent fusions you can have going at one time. This is different than item slots, which dictates how many items you can put into one fusion. Unfortunately, you can only unlock fusion slots with gems.
Last Words
Lastly, I’ll just say that on top of these methods I covered, there are an enormous number of other combinations out there. Some will be good, some won’t. The only real way to master fusion is to try a bunch of combinations yourself to see how item level and quality play into the item result chance. Eventually you might find a combination that is cheap to craft or buy from the Trade House, but nets you huge gold/gem profits.
As you advance through crafting the mid level items, you’ll also notice that more and more items require greats or even flawless precrafts (items to be used as ingredients for other items), and that you’ll be relying on your fusion cauldron almost all the time. Hopefully, some of these methods help you acquire the necessary precrafts in less time and for less ingredients.
Good Luck and pray to RNGesus.