Hey, loungers! Today, I'm taking you on a speed run of Hard Mode 1.
Even after Patch 3.4, which shifted the farming meta, you probably still find yourself farming Hard Mode 1 more than almost any other chapter in the game. It's the perfect way to burn through your energy at the end of the day, using up those free refills to inch closer to that coveted heroic gear.
But did you know there's a genuine form of skill expression in these farming runs? I'll get to that in a bit. The techniques I'm sharing here aren't just for this chapter; they'll sharpen all your farming runs.
I'm Coles, a high-level HVH player. If you find this guide helpful, consider subscribing or signing up for my Patreon, where you'll be entered into monthly drawings for HVH giveaways.
When you load into Hard Mode 1, you face a single choice: Are you trying to go as fast as humanly possible, or are you trying to squeeze out every last coin and bit of experience?
I've run this chapter so many times that the only thing keeping me engaged is the challenge of speed. Trying to perfectly max out XP and gold at the end of a run feels pretty random, so I've found it's better to just go fast.
With speed as our goal, the main objective is to avoid leveling up. Every time the level-up screen appears, you lose a few seconds to loading. To go faster, you need to minimize how often this happens. If you absolutely must level up, try to do it in one large chunk. This consolidates the interruptions, saving you precious time over the course of the run.
For your loadout, prioritize ranged projectiles. Anything that shoots across the screen is a great choice. Think Ice Wand and Poison Darts. You'll want to stay away from weapons with a limited area of effect, like the Hammer or Fire Orbs. These let the horde get too close, forcing you to take more skills and level up more often.
For tomes, focus on enhancing your projectiles with the Cooldown Tome and Duplicator Tome. After that, grab anything that doesn't evolve your weapons. Tomes like the Critome, XPtome, Cointoome, or Durationtome are perfect. Honestly, you're just clicking as fast as you can, so your goal is a hodgepodge of un-synergized skills that keep the projectiles flying.
Believe it or not, pets like Hydrogeyser or Storm Griffin are better for this than Crystal Scythe. Their ranged attacks keep them active in the center of the battlefield, preventing them from getting stuck on one side attacking only a fraction of the horde.
I always run Stantos, but if you don't have him, other heroes excel here. The Arcane Mage is one of the best farming heroes for this specific task. You just need one projectile to hit one enemy, and her ability does exactly that. As a general rule, any ranged hero is better than a melee one, simply because they help you keep your distance and avoid unnecessary level-ups.
So, what is this single form of skill expression I mentioned? It's toggling auto on and off to skip the loading screen between waves.
With the recent, awful change to how post-wave experience is collected, you can actually bypass the collection phase entirely if you time your auto-toggle correctly. This lets you seamlessly transition from one wave to the next, saving a surprising amount of time.
As a quick aside, why was this change made? It's such an awful user experience for what I can only imagine is a marginal improvement in converting players to the no-ads pack. Moving the XP collection until after the wave, and then having a game-breaking bug associated with it... was that really necessary? Ugh. Okay, rant over.
Beyond this trick, there isn't much active gameplay in Hard Mode 1. You'll mostly be standing still, trying not to move while soaking up just enough experience to keep going.
While farming higher chapters like Hard Mode 1-40 is essential for resources like dust and orbs, Hard Mode 1 still holds an important place in the daily grind. The real challenge isn't the gameplay itself, but simply staying awake long enough to dump all your energy before you fall asleep. After three or four runs, those 15 minutes have a magical way of putting me to sleep.
