Since the release of mods, one of the major factors in arena matches has been speed, with a lot of high level arena action being little more than speed contests. Like my previous Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes pieces on offensive stats and defensive stats, in this article, I’m hoping to increase your understanding of speed and teach you to use it to your own advantage.

When looking at speed and turn meter gain, we deal with two different types of turn – a turn where a character gets an action, and a turn for increasing turn meter bars. To differentiate between the two, I’m going to refer to a character’s turn as an action.

A Brief Explanation Of Speed

At the start of a match, each character starts with 0 turn meter (TM) and gains it at a constant rate, equal to that character’s speed. Once the fastest character has gained 1000 TM, that character gets an action, and their TM drops back to 0. This process will repeat for the rest of the match, with differences in speed becoming more apparent as it goes on, since after 25 turns (TM increases), a 200 speed toon will take their fifth action, while a 160 speed toon will be taking their fourth. So faster toons will have actions earlier, and more often in battle.

Turn Meter (TM) Boosting Moves, and Their Complications

Actions that increase turn meter work almost the same way as speed, with the major difference being that they cannot increase past 1000 – so if Captain Phasma uses Victory March to give all allies 50% (500) TM, an ally that has 850 TM already will only gain 150, losing the rest. Because of this, it’s more efficient to time your TM boost so the affected characters only have a little over 500 TM when you use it. Complicating it further, If multiple characters reach 1000 TM at the same time, RNG determines which gets an action first. So, in a scenario where a TM boost has been used to bring all four allies to 100%, it is completely random which of them goes first.

A Look At Turn Order

The key to preventing draws comes down to speed. By properly balancing your speed, you can control the order each of your toons takes an action, get the most out of TM boosts, and remove the random element of draws.

If we look at a rebel team consisting of Stormtrooper Han, Lando, Leia and Ackbar, the TM gain and turn order might look like this.

As the table shows, STH needs 4.88 turns to hit 1000 TM and gain an action. If he taunts, the other three characters will hit 1000 TM and each take an action, but the order they do so is random, and they all waste some TM. If we want Leia to go first and buff the team, followed by Ackbar, to use Tactical Genius, with Lando going last and using Double Down twice, we either rely on RNG, or need to change our speed values.

Turn Order Manipulation

We can check how many turns it takes to gain an action, and how much TM our other characters have with;

Which, shows that STH needs 4.88 turns to reach 1000 TM, and Leia will have 844 TM when he does. From here, we can check how much speed Leia needs to reach the ideal TM when STH has an action and taunts – which is 700 to have an action immediately without wasting any TM.

From there, we don’t really need to work out the ideal speed of our other characters – we know that any with 144 speed or higher will reach 1000 TM as soon as STH taunts, so we want Ackbar to be just under 144, with Lando a little lower again, to give us the turn order we want.

As you can see, by reducing speeds of our characters, we can manipulate the turn order to suit our team. The biggest speed drop was for Leia – 173 to 145, 28 speed, but, it only added 0.2 turns until all our characters had gained an action, and guaranteed Lando was able to do a double AoE with crit chance up. We can also check how fast an enemy would need to be to gain an action before we finished the same way we check our ideal speed – 1000/5.08=197.

Rather than decreasing the speed of our other characters to suit STH, we could go the other way. If we manage to find another 20 speed for STH, without changing anyone else, our turn order would look like;

Taking 4.73 turns to complete our setup and double AoE, outspeeding any characters under 212 speed. Which sounds a lot better, but is also a lot harder to do, since it requires better speed mods.

To Summarise

So as we’ve seen, blindly stacking speed is not always the best, or most efficient way to mod your characters. Tactically increasing or decreasing speed allows you to control the order your characters gain actions, guaranteeing you get a buff up at the right time, have an AoE attacker go after a single target attacker, or any other reason you want a certain character to go before another.

Any team that includes a TM boost can be improved by manipulating the turn order, Droid/Jawas being one with a lot to gain, and even without a boost, turn order can make a huge difference.

By PsychoPoet, Staff Writer