Vlad — official character art, from the announcement
The announcement, verbatim
🍷 New Character: Vlad
Transcendent | Proficiency: Dagger
A legendary count who has guarded the nights of the Cron Kingdom for
centuries.
He never appears in sunlight, and is said to have never suffered a single
defeat.
When he raises his glass, the battlefield turns blood-red.
Join the count in a toast.
[Exclusive Skill]
Wine spills from his glass, creating a blood-red zone.
For a set duration, it deals area damage to enemies within and restores his
health in proportion to the damage dealt.
At 6 stars and above, allies within the blood-red zone also receive healing.
[Runes]
• Rose of Wallachia: Blood thorns rise at regular intervals during the
skill, damaging enemies within range.
• Walpurgis Night: Extends the blood-red zone's duration and increases
the skill damage of allies healed within it.
• Come, Sweet Death: Expands the blood-red zone, causes it to follow
Vlad, and increases the skill's bonus damage.
First: "Transcendent" is a genuinely new word
Every rarity on the site — heroes, weapons, runes — resolves through the game's own ladder, which ends at rank 9, Eternal (grade 2, max level 130). "Transcendent" is not on that ladder. It's not the community's nickname for something existing: it ships as the official label in the announcement itself, in the same line as his weapon proficiency. That makes Vlad the first time the game has ever introduced a rarity name absent from its shipped data — new mechanics happen at every version bump; the naming of a new rarity does not.
What the top of today's ladder looks like, from
CostumeData-derived rarity rows — rank 9 is the ceiling the whole
endgame guide is built on:
| Rank | Name | Max level | +DPS add | DPS mult |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7 | Mythic | 110 | 4,893.0 | 1,969.0 |
| 8 | Exotic | 130 | 14,734.0 | 5,905.0 |
| 9 | Eternal | 130 | 46,882.0 | 17,715.0 |
The kit, translated
Dagger proficiency puts Vlad in the fast-damage weapon family the kit guide already ranks — his spins will slot straight into the DPS calculator once his tier data lands.
- Exclusive skill — the blood-red zone. A timed area damage field, with healing for Vlad proportional to the damage it deals. Classic lifesteal-on-stilts: his own sustain scales with how many bodies are in the zone.
- 6★ and above — support pivot. Ally healing inside the zone makes upgraded Vlad a partial backline support, not just a solo carry — the same kind of kit milestone the tier table tracks for other heroes (2★–6★). Worth watching: whether heal rate overrides or stacks with other healing sources.
- Runes, exclusive to him. Three named runes (below) slot into the 115-rune system the site already tracks — pushing Vlad toward either sustained damage (Rose of Wallachia, thorns ticks), uptime-and-support (Walpurgis Night, longer zone, healed allies deal more skill damage), or zone-dominance (Come, Sweet Death — mobile, bigger, bonus damage). It's the same "rune changes the kit, not the hero" pattern the 43-weapon Hero Rune set established; these three would be his, numbered among them.
In the current build? A byte-level sweep
We've searched the entire extraction — every locale string, every hero table, every rune table — for Vlad's markers. It is a clean sheet:
- "Vlad", "Wallachia", "Walpurgis", "Come, Sweet Death" — zero matches across every locale, hero and rune table in the build. The game's friendly-lobby table coins fake players for leaderboards — and that's the only "Vladimir"-shape string the sweep can even find.
- "Cron Kingdom" — not in any shipped lore yet either (despite the announcement naming it). New world-building ahead of a new character is exactly how this game writes.
- "Transcendent" — absent from the 9-rank ladder, absent from every rarity string the game ships today.
Translation: Vlad, his art, his runes, his rarity — all of it ships with a future build, byte-for-byte new. Exactly like the Hero Runes were, back in the 26.0.0 sneak peek — a system unveiled by announcement weeks before a single byte of it existed in the game.
The likely ship vehicle: Version 27
Coincidence or calendar, the timing lines up perfectly with the update the game is already warming up for: Lucky Spin 1 is paused right now precisely to wait for Version 27 — the same update that would carry Vlad, his rarity row, his tier data and his three runes into the client. When 27 lands, the pipeline's job is the usual: diff every table, run the rarity sweep again, and turn Vlad from a press release into numbers.
What we're watching for
- A release date — the announcement gives none.
- Version 27's tables: whether "Transcendent" becomes the new rank-10 row (and what its max level and DPS multipliers are), or a standalone hero-class label outside the ladder.
- Vlad's full stats and evolution chain — then straight into the Hero Builder, the DPS calculator and the kit guide, same-day.
- His three runes entering the table — 43 Hero Runes may become 46 the morning he goes live.
We'll update this post the moment any of it lands in a downloadable build.
Quoted announcement is from the official XP Hero Discord. XP Hero is developed by Supercent — XPHero Fans is a fan project, unofficial and not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Rarity ladder numbers shown are from the game's own data tables (game v26.2.0); Vlad's art is the official announcement image.