| 10 | +20% Chance to find items used to spin Lucky Wheel |
|---|---|
| 20 | +1 Starting Upgrade(s) |
| 30 | x1.20 damage to frozen enemies |
| 40 | HOLIDAY LOOTER: During December, Santa gets the following bonuses per run |
| 50 | All Heroes: +10% Pickup Range |
| 60 | +10% Area of Effect |
| 70 | All Heroes: +2.5% XP Bonus |
| 80 | GIFT MINE: Santa drops a gift bomb every 4 seconds which explodes for 1000%/1200%/1400%/1600%/1800% weapon damage when enemies get close. |
| 90 | All Heroes that share faction: +1% chance of getting a gold key on completing a run |
| 100 | HELPING ELVES: Killing enemies fill a meter. When full, spawns 10/12/14/16/18 elves for 10s, attacking enemies with 50% weapon damage. |
| 120 | All Heroes: +5% Chance to find items used to spin Lucky Wheel |
| 140 | Strong Stat Bonus: +5% Chance to Earn a Gold Key on Chapter Completion (Additive) |
| 160 | All Heroes: +100% Damage |
Hey, loungers, Kolz here. Today, I'm gonna go through why I think Santa is one of the best heroes in HvH.
Farming is the most time-intensive part of Heroes versus Hordes, and Santa can save you literal days of gameplay. You'll use him so much, you'll actually come to hate him.
He started off as my favorite hero, and I've seen his butt so much now that I can barely stand to see it anymore.
However, that's what you want. He's so strong, you need to use him as often as you can and feel guilty when you don't.
Santa is great for two reasons:
He's the only hero in the game with an increase to gold key chance, and that's massively important. Each 1% increase in gold key chance is like a 6% increase in silver key chance. And without him, you're gonna be down 11% in gold key chance.
That's over half a silver key per run! And when you're doing thousands and thousands of runs, every little chance helps.
So let's break down how to use the gold key chance to your advantage.
Santa is the ultimate farmer because his whole kit gets you coins and keys. You get straight coins from star levels. You get more coins from all the XP increases. Then you get the ultimate buff - gold key chance - from three sources.
Luckily, because of a glitch when they first released Santa, you got 375 hero shards, and they never took that glitch away. You still receive those hero shards when you get Santa, which is awesome. You automatically get them up to three stars.
To get to four stars, that means you're gonna need 75 more hero shards. You need to get those hero shards as fast as you can because getting that extra 5% gold key chance at 140 is huge. The easiest way at this point is via Dragon's Tower.
Doing the quick math, if you get all of your talents all the way skilled up, you'll have a 15% chance of getting a gold key at the end of a run. Going from 15 percentage points to 26 percentage points is like a 73% increase in your gold key chance.
Now let's say you're at full mythic gear, so you have all yellows, and you want to get to full heroic gear, all powder blues. Using the HVH tool calculator, that would require approximately 6,716 runs.
That's a long ass time.
But if you get Santa, you're down to only 5,221 runs. That's 1,500 runs saved. In terms of time, that's 22,500 minutes, 375 hours, or approximately 15.625 days.
So if you want to know how to measure a Santa, it's in the entire time.
The aim with Santa's gear is to max your key chance without dying. You want to use Santa literally everywhere you can. Adventure Progression, regular progression, guild events, heck even Hero Clash, you want to try and use Santa.
So with that in mind, you start with Noble Gear and go from there:
| Helm: Noble | Gloves: Noble |
| Chest: Noble | Necklace: Noble |
| Boots: Noble/Wizard | Ring: Noble |
If you're pushing levels or farming higher Chapters, then start to remove Noble Gear for your highest DPS gear, while maintaining key chance. I normally go with Rogue Gloves and Necklace when I do this:
| Helm: Noble | Gloves: Rogue |
| Chest: Noble | Necklace: Rogue |
| Boots: Noble/Wizard | Ring: Noble |
However, you do sacrifice some coins for the damage boost. Just keep moving off Noble to other gear pieces as you need more damage for the game mode you're playing.
Same goes for Jewels and Weapons.
For Santa, you want to evolve as FEW weapons as possible.
That's not a typo. I bolded it and capitalized it for emphasis.
Every time you don't evolve a weapon, that's another level of experience you can turn into coins. Ovr the course of thousands of runs, that will add up.
That makes an ideal Santa weapons setup look something like:
Bomb
Fire Orbs
Chain Lightning
Crossbow
Ice Wand
Those are pretty standard, it's tomes that get odd:
Coin
XP
Cooldown
Critical
Duration
You want duration tome for the odd instance when Auto Santa runs into a coin power-up. Duration will make it last longer.
If you don't have the base damage to go this light on weapons, start by adding back damage tome > area tome > duplicator tome to the build. Try to keep Coin Tome for maxing coins.
Jewels are simpler.
Rule of thumb: Run as many key jewels as you can get away with. Then any coin jewels if you can't fill up on keys chance.
If you need more damage, then it's vulnerability > ultimate charge > ultimate duration > cooldown.
So jewel priority is:
Key
Coin
Vulnerability
Only run more damage jewels if you are trying to progress or hit a higher reward chapter.
Because people ask this a lot, the 20% chance for the Lucky Wheel is actual garbage. It's only for one event, and that's like the Easter event from this year, where you have to break things on the battlefield in order to collect items that will eventually allow you to spin a wheel. So you can ignore where it says in his kit, "a greater chance of finding items," because you're not really ever going to use that.
The other thing is, his skills that give a bonus during December are godlike. So, for December, you want to make sure that you have that skill leveled up as high as you can. That extra percentage, as I talked about earlier with this gold key chance, is huge, and for all of those other resources, it's also incredibly valuable.
