Endless Legend 2 Hero Skills Guide: Mastering the Counselor and Council System

Endless Legend 2 has a lot going on beneath its beautiful ocean-world setting. Saiadha is already a fascinating place to explore, with shifting environments, dangerous tidefalls, strange civilizations, and the looming threat of catastrophic Monsoons. But after spending time with 4X strategy games, I quickly found that the battles and exploration are only half of the story. If you want a truly efficient empire, you need to understand your heroes and, more importantly, how to use the Council system.

Amplitude Studios has taken the traditional hero system and pushed it much further. Your characters aren’t simply commanders you send into battle or governors you park inside an important city. Once assigned as Counselors, their abilities can influence your entire empire. That makes every recruitment decision, skill point, and Council appointment potentially important several dozen turns later.

The interesting part is that there isn’t one universally perfect Council composition. The best lineup depends on what your empire needs at that moment. An economic counselor can be incredible while you’re expanding, for example, but that same character may feel almost useless when Saiadha enters its final crisis. In my experience with strategy games, this kind of transition is exactly what separates a functional build from a genuinely optimized one.

Endless Legend 2 Sandshapers Faction Guide Core Mechanics and Strategy

How the Council System Works in Endless Legend 2

Heroes in Endless Legend 2 effectively have multiple jobs. A character can command an army, govern a city, or become a Counselor who provides bonuses across your empire. Understanding this distinction is essential because putting the right hero in the wrong role can waste a huge portion of their potential.

As a governor, a hero concentrates their abilities on a specific settlement. This is ideal when you have a character whose skills complement the needs of a particularly important city. A production-focused governor, for example, can turn an already strong industrial settlement into an absolute powerhouse.

A Counselor works differently. Instead of improving one location, their specialized Counselor effects can influence your wider empire. Suddenly, a bonus that looks modest on paper can become extremely powerful when multiplied across dozens of districts, citizens, or cities.

That last role deserves special attention because the Council turns heroes into something closer to strategic infrastructure. You’re not merely deciding who has the strongest combat statistics. You’re deciding which passive effects deserve to be applied to every corner of your civilization.

When Do Council Seats Unlock?

Your Council doesn’t begin with its maximum number of positions. Instead, its capacity grows alongside the progression of Saiadha’s Monsoon cycles. This is an important pacing mechanic because it prevents you from immediately stacking several powerful empire-wide effects at the beginning of the game.

• First Monsoon: 2 Council seats become available.
• Second Monsoon: The Council expands to 3 seats.
• Third Monsoon and beyond: You reach the maximum of 4 seats.

Four slots might not sound like much, but that’s actually what makes the system interesting. You will eventually have more useful heroes than available Council positions, forcing you to decide which bonuses are genuinely worth keeping. A character with an excellent economic trait might have to give way to a military specialist when the late game starts getting ugly.

There is another reason to think carefully before changing your lineup. Reassigning heroes isn’t completely free, and the cost increases as you make additional changes during the same cycle. The initial adjustment can cost 40 resources, with the price increasing by another 20 for subsequent changes. If you’re constantly swapping Counselors just to test different bonuses, your economy can take a needless hit.

Governor or Counselor? Don’t Confuse the Two

This is probably the biggest mistake I would expect a new player to make. You find a hero with an attractive skill, put them somewhere, and assume you’re getting the maximum value from that character. Unfortunately, the location and role of the hero matter enormously.

A governor is about local efficiency. If a city desperately needs Industry, Food, or another specific resource, assigning the right hero there can have an immediate impact. This is especially useful when one settlement has become the economic heart of your empire.

A Counselor is about scale. A relatively small bonus that affects every city can eventually outperform a much larger bonus restricted to a single settlement. This is where the mathematics of a 4X game starts becoming important: the larger your empire becomes, the more valuable broad percentage bonuses and flat district bonuses can become.

There’s also a trap here that experienced strategy players will recognize. Don’t build a hero for combat and then leave them sitting on the Council forever. If you spend most of their Hero Points improving battlefield abilities, their potential as a domestic specialist becomes weaker. Conversely, a carefully developed economic counselor may be an awful army commander. Specialization is not just useful in Endless Legend 2; it is often the smarter long-term approach.

The Counselor Archetypes Worth Watching

Collectivist: The Expansion Specialist

The Collectivist archetype is one of the most attractive options when your empire is still growing. Characters such as Bishop Anna Magda can provide valuable infrastructure and population-related bonuses, including bonuses to Industry from Citizens and additional Population Slots. Those effects may seem relatively small when you first unlock them, but their value increases as your empire becomes wider and more populated.

I particularly like this type of Counselor for expansion-heavy games. New settlements usually need time to become productive, and anything that accelerates that process makes your entire empire feel less sluggish. If you’re trying to establish multiple colonies while keeping your economy healthy, a Collectivist-style counselor can quietly become one of the most valuable members of your Inner Circle.

Grifter: Incredible Output, Painful Approval

The Grifter is a completely different beast. A character such as Bishop Leonardo Movano can provide enormous economic benefits, including +15% Dust and +15% Industry on Cities. For a civilization that needs money and production immediately, those numbers are difficult to ignore.

The catch is brutal: the archetype also carries a significant Approval penalty. A reduction of 25 Approval across your cities is not something you can casually overlook. The Grifter therefore works best when you’ve already built systems capable of compensating for the downside through luxury resources, technologies, or other approval bonuses.

Personally, this is exactly the sort of mechanic I enjoy in a strategy game. The game isn’t telling you that the Grifter is good or bad. It’s asking whether you can absorb the cost. If your empire is stable, the extra production can be ridiculous. If your approval is already hanging by a thread, you’re basically inviting trouble.

Dust Trickster: The Late-Game Money Machine

Mary Bridges represents another interesting economic approach. Instead of focusing primarily on city-level percentages, the Dust Trickster archetype can provide a flat Dust bonus to Districts. The real strength of this effect becomes obvious once your empire contains a large number of developed districts.

This is a classic 4X scaling mechanic. A flat bonus might look unimpressive in the early game, but once your civilization spreads across the map and cities become increasingly dense, every district becomes another source of income. What starts as pocket change can eventually become a major financial engine for military upkeep, diplomacy, and strategic purchases.

Faction-Specific Counselor Synergies

You should also pay attention to faction-specific interactions. The Kin of Sheredyn, for instance, can make particularly interesting use of specialized Counselor characters such as Badge. Depending on your build, these effects can strengthen military districts while simultaneously improving several economic and strategic outputs.

This is why copying a generic Council setup from another player’s game isn’t always the best idea. A Counselor that is incredible for one faction may be merely average for another. Always consider the bonuses alongside your faction’s natural strengths rather than evaluating each hero in isolation.

Hero Skills and the Importance of Tier Progression

Your heroes become substantially more interesting as they gain Hero Points. Their skill trees are divided into progression tiers, meaning you can’t simply rush directly to the strongest ability without investing elsewhere first.

This progression creates another important decision. Do you spread your points across several useful abilities, or rush toward a specific high-tier perk? There isn’t a universal answer. Early in the game, broad improvements can be more useful because your empire is still developing. Later, however, reaching a powerful Tier 3 ability can completely change the value of a Counselor.

If I were building a dedicated economic Counselor, I would avoid spending points simply because an ability looks attractive. Every point should reinforce the job you expect that hero to perform. A character intended to spend most of the game in the Council should be developed very differently from a frontline commander.

How Councilors Gain Experience

One of the more unusual aspects of the system is that Councilors aren’t leveling in the same way as heroes who constantly participate in combat. Once a character settles into a domestic role, their progression comes from passive experience tied to the broader performance of your empire and successful diplomatic activity.

That means you shouldn’t automatically think of a Council appointment as removing a character from progression. Instead, you’re trading one form of progression for another. If you want to maximize a Counselor’s development, early investments into abilities such as the Intuition line can help, while suitable equipment such as the Ward of Seekers can further improve experience acquisition.

The key lesson is simple: don’t ignore your Councilors just because they aren’t fighting. A properly developed Counselor can become more valuable over time precisely because their bonuses continue affecting your entire empire while they level passively.

Preparing Your Council for the Endless Monsoon

The late game is where the Council system really starts proving its worth. As the Endless Monsoon arrives, Saiadha becomes an increasingly hostile place, and the environmental devastation changes the way you need to approach your empire. Ash-filled skies, dangerous enemies, and the appearance of threats such as the Keeper of the Depths and Doomwraith forces can put enormous pressure on even a well-developed civilization.

This is the point where I would seriously reconsider an early-game Council lineup. The economic Counselor who helped your empire grow may no longer be the character you need. When the world is collapsing around you, military production, defensive bonuses, unit efficiency, and the ability to maintain your economy under pressure become much more important.

Ideally, you want your strongest late-game Counselor abilities ready before the final Monsoon cycle. Waiting until the crisis has already started to rebuild your Council can leave you scrambling at exactly the wrong moment.

My Recommended Council Strategy

If you’re playing your first serious campaign, I wouldn’t try to create the perfect Council immediately. Instead, think of your Council as something that should evolve with your empire. Early expansion, mid-game consolidation, and late-game survival all place different demands on your civilization.

A simple progression might look like this:

• Early game: Prioritize expansion, population growth, and infrastructure.
• Mid game: Shift toward scalable Dust, Industry, Science, or diplomatic advantages.
• Late game: Replace outdated economic specialists with military and crisis-oriented Counselors when necessary.
• Endgame: Focus on bonuses that directly help you survive the Monsoon and finish your victory condition.

Most importantly, don’t waste Council changes without a reason. Because replacing Counselors becomes increasingly expensive during a cycle, every swap should have a purpose. If you’re changing your lineup, do it because your empire’s strategic situation has changed—not because you simply found another hero who looks interesting.

Final Thoughts

The Endless Legend 2 hero skills and Counselor system is one of the mechanics that can easily be underestimated during the first few hours. At first, it looks like another menu for assigning characters. After a longer campaign, however, the Council starts to feel like the strategic brain of your civilization, especially once your empire has grown large enough for small bonuses to multiply across dozens of districts and cities.

What I like most is the tension between specialization and flexibility. You have limited seats, heroes with very different purposes, escalating reassignment costs, and skill trees that reward commitment. That forces you to think beyond the next battle and consider what your empire will actually need twenty or thirty turns from now.

My biggest advice is to stop treating heroes as interchangeable characters. Build them around a purpose. Put combat specialists where they can fight, use governors to transform the cities that need them most, and reserve your Council seats for characters whose bonuses become stronger when applied across an entire empire. Once you start thinking about heroes this way, the Council stops being a secondary system and becomes one of the most powerful tools you have for controlling Saiadha.