Halloween showed up early this year, and it brought a pumpkin-headed assassin with a haunting bow. He's been around for a while, but with a brand-new forge and one of the most absurd globals in the game, this hero just quietly turned into one of the strongest special-faction pulls you can hope for.
His name: Pumpkin Shade.
An adventure-scaling, projectile-spamming, orb-multiplying machine, Pumpkin Shade is a hero who looks fine on paper and absolutely wrecks the second you actually use him.
So, let's carve into Pumpkin Shade and see why this guy is sitting at S-tier on every late-game roster.
| 10 | -5% Cooldown |
|---|---|
| 20 | +1 Physical Projectile(s) |
| 30 | +1 Projectile(s) |
| 40 | PUMPKIN BOMBS: Pumpkin Shade throws many little bombs that deal 720% damage. |
| 50 | All Heroes: +12.5% Damage |
| 60 | +1 Projectile(s) |
| 70 | All Heroes: +12.5% Damage |
| 80 | CURSED ARROWS: Pumpkin Shade shoots large burning arrows in random directions. Every 0.5s, arrows release a spooky shockwave. Both arrow and shockwave deal 120% damage. |
| 90 | All Heroes that share Faction: +50% extra orbs on completing a run |
| 100 | PUMPKIN KING'S WRATH: Every weapon kill fills a meter, when full Pumpkin Shade spawns 5 orbiting jack'o'lanterns. The lanterns breathe flames that deal 170% damage every 0.2s. |
| 120 | All Heroes: x1.025 Damage |
| 140 | Strong Stat Bonus |
| 160 | All Heroes: +100% Damage |
Pumpkin Shade is a special-faction hero with a Haunting Bow, and the wild thing is that he's strong from the moment you grab him. His base kit gives you -5% cooldown, +1 physical projectile, and +1 projectile right out of the gate—so even at three star levels with no forge, he can carry through a chunk of normal mode and hard mode just from the raw projectile count alone.
Like most of the recent special-faction releases, he scales with adventure stars, which means his ceiling is way higher than older specials like Santa or Leprechaun. Get him to four stars and his skills start putting up genuine top-tier numbers. Get him forged up too and he's a Void-Raven-tier boss brawler. He's not just a global hero—he's a damage hero who happens to come with a game-warping global attached.
Pumpkin Shade's globals aren't going to win awards on their own. The level 50 and 70 share-faction damage globals are perfectly fine and forgettable. The 120 is a 1.025x damage multiplier, which is fine. The 160 is the standard +100% damage. None of that is the story.
That level 90 is the entire ballgame. Fifty percent extra hero orbs on every run, applied to every share-faction hero, for the rest of your account's lifetime. That isn't a typo—I've checked. Frey'd themselves confirmed it. There is no other global like this in the game. Every grind, every farm, every late-game push, this multiplier is paying you back. You appreciate it more the deeper you get into the game.
If Pumpkin Shade did literally nothing else but show up and provide that level 90 global, he'd still be S-tier. The fact that he's also a top damage hero is just gravy on the haunted pumpkin pie.
Credit:@FreyaWood
Pumpkin Shade originally launched without a forge, but his Halloween update gave him one—and it's a strong one. Every forge level here boosts skills, which is exactly what you want, since his star scaling lives in the skills.
Level 1: Bouncing Heads — Pumpkin Bombs bounce one time and explode on each bounce. Or Arrow Storm — increase the amount of cursed arrows by 25%. Both are pure damage upgrades to different skills. Honestly, I haven't done enough testing to declare a winner—they're both good, and depending on whether you're leaning into the bombs or the arrows, either choice is correct.
Level 2: Constant Spook — instead of throwing bombs in a cross, continuously throw a single bomb every 0.5 seconds. Or Bouncing Arrows — cursed arrows are deflected on the edge of the screen one time. Constant Spook is a huge uptime upgrade for the bomb skill. Bouncing Arrows is essentially extra hits per arrow. Pick whichever pairs with your level-1 choice.
Level 4 (Scarecrow Bomb): The weapon evolves and now spawns a scarecrow bomb that feeds on nearby defeated enemies, becoming stronger the more souls it consumes. This is where Pumpkin Shade got a real power boost. The evolve is off Damage Tome, which is core in every build, so getting there is easy.
Level 5: Two flavors of the scarecrow. One slows enemies, the other has the scarecrow explode for extra damage. Both are upgrades to the level-4 evolve. The damage option is the cleaner pick for clearing normal/hard mode and for boss brawl. The slow option has uses in nightmare mode if you need crowd control.
The headline here is that everything in his forge is buffing skills, not the weapon. That's been the trend in HvH design lately, and Pumpkin Shade was one of the heroes that benefited the most from the shift. Older heroes like Bunni still have some legacy projectile-speed nonsense in their forges; Pumpkin Shade is built clean.
Pumpkin Shade has three skills, and—unlike Santa or Leprechaun, where some of the kit is utility—every single one of these does damage. They all scale with star levels, and getting him to four-star is when this hero really starts pumping.
Pumpkin Shade throws little tiny bombs in a cross pattern that deal a whole bunch of damage. Pure AoE, easy to land, scales hard with star level. The bombs cover enough ground that they cover most of the screen by themselves.
Pumpkin Shade shoots large burning arrows in random directions. Every 0.5 seconds, those arrows release a spooky shockwave. Both the arrow and the shockwave deal 120% damage. So you've got the arrow itself, the shockwave it pulses out, and they both scale—which is what makes this such a strong damage skill.
Every weapon kill fills a meter. Once full, Pumpkin Shade spawns five orbiting jack-o'-lanterns. The lanterns breathe flames that deal 170% damage every 0.2 seconds. Five orbiting flame-throwing pumpkins doing rapid-tick damage is exactly as silly as it sounds, and exactly as strong as it sounds. The ultimate is screen-wide pressure that pairs perfectly with the bombs and arrows already covering the field.
Combine all three with his base weapon, which splits projectiles into multiples on hit, and you've got a hero whose damage covers basically the entire screen at once. This is why he can push deep into normal mode, hard mode, and even nightmare mode as your primary clear hero.
Watching Pumpkin Shade play out, what's striking is how much of the screen his kit covers. Bombs going off in a cross pattern, cursed arrows flying in random directions and pulsing shockwaves, base-weapon arrows splitting into multiples on hit, and five flaming jack-o'-lanterns orbiting in the middle of it all. Comparing him to a hero like Slime Sage in the same try-mode setup, Slime Sage would die. Pumpkin Shade just keeps stacking damage on every part of the field at once.
The honest read on Pumpkin Shade is that he's an early-game carry, a mid-game grinder, and a late-game farming engine all in one body. Pull him in your first ten or twenty heroes and he can solo you through normal mode and hard mode. Get him to four stars and he becomes a top-tier hero clear option. Get him to five-star forge and he's a Void-Raven-tier boss brawler.
And on top of all that, that level 90 global is paying you 50% extra orbs every single run for the rest of your account's life. There's no other hero who does this. Most of his utility goes unappreciated until you're a few months in and start feeling the orb crunch on a 20+ hero roster—at which point Pumpkin Shade is suddenly the most valuable hero you own.
If you got him from a wheel pull or a mining event, congratulations: you got the best hero of the bunch. If you didn't, save hero shards for him in the marketplace before almost anyone else. The Pumpkin King is silently the most important hero in your special-faction lineup.
