How this was measured

The method

A Heroes replay is an MPQ archive containing a tracker log: every unit born and killed with a timestamp, plus the game's own named stat events — Altar Captured, TributeCollected, SkyTempleActivated, GatesOpen and others. A dependency-free Python reader in the repository decodes both streams and each battleground gets its own handler, because the maps mark their cycles differently.

Two rules keep the figures honest, and both corrected real errors before they were applied. Unit identity is the tag index plus its recycle counter, since the index alone is reused between units and matches deaths to the wrong unit. And every interval is the gap between two events inside one replay, so the offset between replay time and the in-game clock cannot bias it. Where an absolute time is needed, GatesOpen anchors in-game 0:00.

Why the wiki couldn't be used to check it

The community reference for these timings is a 2021 reddit sheet, measured from triggers and replays on patch 2.54.4. It is careful work and most of it holds up. But the Heroes wiki's objective timers were edited the day after it was posted, and the Nexus Compendium maintainer published a changelog in that very thread adopting it. Both are downstream of the sheet, so their agreement with it is circular rather than corroborating.

What changed

The 30-second lock is real — the lock unit lives 30.06s in every instance, and no tribute was ever captured sooner than 36.75s after appearing. The error was adding it a second time to intervals that already contained it:

• Cursed Hollow — 50–90s, not 80–120s. 142 cycles.
• Alterac Pass — 110–150s minus 2s per in-game minute, not 140–180s. 16 of 17 de-scaled cycles land inside.
• Volskaya Foundry — a capture point charges in 48s, not the widely quoted 52s. A point was seen completing 48.00s after unlocking.

Separately, two maps have been patched since 2021 and the guides never caught up: Alterac Pass's capture is 25s rather than 30s and caps at 55s, and Blackheart's turn-in costs 8 doubloons rather than 10.

Where it stops

Volskaya Foundry's cycle is inferred, not timed: the Triglav Protector is a piloted vehicle, so it is never born or killed in the log, and the 180s figure comes from subtracting a modelled Protector duration — the evidence is that the remainder never exceeds 183.0s. Towers of Doom logs altar captures but never the unlock, leaving a floor of 116.25s consistent with 110s plus the channel. Braxis Holdout rests on only three cycles. Every other figure is a direct event-to-event gap.

Nothing here is a hero cheatsheet yet, and nothing on this site claims a number it did not measure.

Credit

To the author of the 2021 sheet, whose first-objective times all survived re-measurement, and to the reader who checked Cursed Hollow against mapmechanicslib.galaxy and found the double-count years before this was rebuilt.